Table of Contents
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. Unicode is an internationally recognized standard, adopted by industry leaders. The Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646.
It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are among the most significant recent global software technology trends. Incorporating Unicode into client-server or multi-tiered applications and websites offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets.
As a modern XML Editor, <oXygen/> provides support for the Unicode standard enabling your XML application to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. Internally, the <oXygen/> XML Editor uses 16bit characters covering the Unicode Character set.
On loading documents <oXygen/> receives the encoding of the document from the Eclipse platform. This is then used to instruct the Java Encoder to load support for and save using the code chart specified.
While in most cases you will use UTF-8, simply changing the encoding name will cause the file to be saved using the new encoding. The appendix Unicode Character Encoding provides a matrix that matches common names with Java Names. It also explains what you should type in the XML prolog to cause the document to be saved as the required encoding.
To edit document written in Japanese or Chinese, you will need to change the font to one that supports the specific characters (a Unicode font). For the Windows platform, use of Arial Unicode MS or MS Gothic is recommended. Do not expect Wordpad or Notepad to handle these encodings. Use Internet Explorer or Word to eventually examine XML documents.
When a document with a UTF-16 encoding is edited and saved in <oXygen/>, the saved document will have a byte order mark (BOM) which will specify the byte order of the document's content. The default byte order is platform dependent. That means that a UTF-16 document created on a Windows platform (where the default byte order mark is UnicodeLittle) will have a different BOM than a UTF-16 document created on a Mac OS platform (where the byte order mark is UnicodeBig). The byte order and the BOM of an existing document will be preserved by <oXygen/> when the document is edited and saved.
The naming convention used under Java does not always correspond to the common names used by the Unicode standard. For instance, while in XML you will use encoding="UTF-8", in Java the same encoding has the name "UTF8".